Welcome to Tranmere Rovers, a football club at war with its fans

When Ben Harrison arrived for a meeting with Mark Palios one evening in April 2023, he knew not to expect the warmest greeting. Harrison had just received an expletive-ridden series of text messages from Palios’s wife, Nicola, the co-owner of Tranmere Rovers. 

“Mark and I are still funding the fucking wages and you are stabbing us in the back…we need to speak face to face,” reads one of the texts. Harrison arrived at the urgent summit, and was told Palios would soon join him.

Harrison, the long-standing chairman of Tranmere’s Supporters Trust, was, at this point, in the latter stages of a terminal cancer diagnosis. He was visibly frail. According to the accounts of three people Harrison spoke to in the days after, Mark Palios, once the chief executive of the FA, came into the room and set about berating him for comments he had made on a podcast. Harrison apologised, but at one stage Palios is said to have kicked a chair at him.

The podcast comments related, of all things, to a project Harrison’s Trust had been undertaking since 2020 to build a replacement to the club’s old and tired Fan Park, which was little more than a marquee. A 10-year lease had been agreed for the new site in April 2023, the same month Harrison was summoned for his dressing down.

The new Fan Park would be built in partnership with the company German Kraft, and designs showed an impressive glasshouse structure; far from the dreary ‘larger and a burger’ offering best associated with the lower tiers of English Football. The Trust had raised money via a crowdfunder (£352k) and via bondholder loans (£280k) that would have to be repaid, to help fund the project, which initially had the full backing of the club. 

But at some stage, the club’s chairman appears to be souring on the project. The club says this is because it was mismanaged, the Trust have other theories. Regardless, a friend of  Harrison’s says he was “visibly shaken” the morning after his meeting with Palios, while one person close to the Trust told The Post they were “disgusted” by what had taken place. 

A meeting at the coffee shop

On 8 August 2023, Ben Harrison died. He was hailed as a tireless campaigner on behalf of Tranmere’s fans and many offered tributes. A statement released by the Trust made reference to what they hoped would form part of his legacy: “Ben’s vision to build a Fan Park for the benefit of Tranmere supporters, the Club and local residents is one that we continue to work on in honour of his memory.”

Like almost every part of this strange and convoluted story, the above account of Harrison’s meeting with Mark Palios is strongly disputed by the club. They told The Post that while Palios “did raise his voice there was no physical altercation whatsoever”. They added that the pair had remained friends until the latter’s death and that Harrison had apologised to the Palioses for speaking out of turn on the podcast (Harrison had effectively suggested fans use his new fan park instead of buying the club’s hospitality tickets).

In truth, this story is a minefield. Both sides have sent The Post extensive documentation regarding what is essentially a dispute over the construction of a fancy marquee. Law firms including Mishcon de Reya and Hill Dickinson have become involved and unravelling all of the technicalities in full detail would likely take months. The consequence of it all has been a situation where a football club and its main fan group are engaged in a kind of civil war with little sign of resolution, while the unfinished Fan Park rots in the car park and many fans look on in dismay.

The Fan Park project was first suggested in 2020. From the outset, it seemed to have everyone’s backing. For the past nine years, the Trust had operated the previous Fan Park, the now shabby-looking one, turning frequent profits. The new structure, however, would be the gold standard of Fan Parks, a glorious timber-framed glasshouse with a swooping roof and as many Czech pils as Tranmere fans desired. (“As one Tranmere tells me: “We aren’t the sort of fans who go to the match for a Carling”).

Or so the CGI renders showed it to be. What appears to be agreed on by all sides is that soon after the death of Ben Harrison, the club came to the sudden conclusion the project was not viable. Costs had risen, and while the club agreed this change of circumstances was to some degree unavoidable (such as costing increases in light of the Liz Truss emergency budget in 2022) they also felt the Trust group had failed to heed warnings from a series of technical experts, and had ploughed on ahead with a project that they had insufficient funds to see through. They began to claim the lease agreement was invalid, something the Trust says is ridiculous.

Amid the uncertainty, Palios met with Trust members at Home coffee shop in Oxton, which had been Ben Harrison’s business, not long after Harrison’s death. During the meeting, Palios sat making notes on his iPad. When it was his turn to speak he told the Trust members that they were effectively insolvent and could be liable to lose their homes and businesses. The group, which included teachers and small businesses, became split. Some members left the group soon after, fearing they might wind up liable for any losses the project incurred, but most felt Palios was attempting to bully them and decided to stand their ground.